Re: GR Proposal: GFDL statement
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I second the proposal quoted below.
Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> Why the GNU Free Documentation License is not suitable for Debian main
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Context
> -------
> Within the Debian community there has been a significant amount of concern
> about the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), and whether it is, in
> fact, a "free" license. This document attempts to explain why Debian's
> answer is that it is not free enough for the Debian distribution.
> It should be noted that this does not imply any hostility towards the
> Free Software Foundation, and does not mean that GFDL documentation
> should not be considered "free enough" by others. Debian itself will
> continue distributing GFDL documentation in its "non-free" section,
> which does not have such strict requirements.
> This document covers the GFDL version 1.2, which is the most current
> version at the time of writing. Earlier versions of the GFDL have similar,
> related problems.
> What is the GFDL?
> -----------------
> The GFDL is a license written by the Free Software Foundation, who
> use it as a license for their own documentation and promote it to
> others. Notably, it is also used as Wikipedia's license. The GFDL is a
> "copyleft" license in that modifications to documentation made under the
> GFDL must in turn be released under the GFDL, not some more restrictive
> license.
> How does the GFDL fail to meet Debian's standards for Free Software?
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> The GFDL conflicts with Debian's traditional requirements for free
> software in a variety of ways, some of which are expanded upon below. As
> a copyleft license, one of the consequences of this is that it is not
> possible to include content from GFDL documentation directly into free
> software.
> The major conflicts are:
> Unmodifiable Sections
> ---------------------
> The most troublesome conflict concerns the class of unmodifiable sections
> that, once included, may not be modified or removed from the documentation
> in the future. These are Cover Texts, Dedications, Acknowledgements,
> and Invariant Sections. Modifiability is a fundamental requirement of
> the DFSG, which states:
> 3. Derived Works
> The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must
> allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of
> the original software.
> These components create particular problems in reusing small portions of
> the work (since any invariant sections must be included also, however
> large), and in making sure that documentation remains accurate and
> relevant.
> Transparent Copies
> ------------------
> The second conflict is related to the GFDL's requirements for "transparent
> copies" of documentation (that is, a copy of the documentation in a form
> suitable for editing). In particular, Section 3 of the GFDL requires
> that a transparent copy of the documentation be included with every
> opaque copy distributed, or that a transparent copy be made available
> for a year after the opaque copies are no longer being distributed.
> For free software works, Debian expects that simply providing the source
> (or transparent copy) alongside derivative works will be sufficient,
> and that users need not be forced to obtain the source with every copy
> of the binary they download, but this does not satisfy either clause of
> the GFDL's requirements.
> Digital Rights Management
> -------------------------
> The third conflict with the GFDL arises from the measures in Section 2
> that attempt to overcome Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. In
> particular, the GFDL states that "You may not use technical measures
> to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you
> make or distribute". This inhibits freedom in three ways: it limits use
> of the documentation as well as distribution, by covering all copies
> made, as well as copies distributed; it rules out distributing copies
> on DRM-protected media, even if done in such a way as to give users
> full access to a transparent copy of the work; and, as written, it also
> potentially disallows encrypting the documentation, or even storing
> it on a system that provides user restrictions or file permissions for
> the documentation.
> Why does documentation need to be Free Software?
> ------------------------------------------------
> The question of "Why does software need free documentation?" has been
> addressed in the past by the Free Software Foundation in the essay
> _Free Software and Free Manuals_ [0].
> [0] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html
> There are a number of obvious differences between programs and
> documentation that often inspire people to ask "why not simply have
> different standards for the two?" For example, books are often written
> by individuals, while programs are written by teams, so proper credit
> for a book might be more important than proper credit for a program.
> On the other hand, free software is often written by a single person,
> and free software documentation is often written by a larger group of
> contributors. Even the line between what is documentation and what is
> a program is not always so clear, as content from one is often needed
> in the other (to provide online help, or to provide screenshots or
> interactive tutorials, or to provide a more detailed explanation by
> quoting some of the source code). Similarly, while not all programs
> demonstrate creativity or could be considered "works of art", some can,
> and trying to determine which is the case for all the software in Debian
> would be a distraction from our goals.
> In practice, then, particularly for Debian's purposes, documentation
> simply isn't different enough to warrant different standards in the
> freedoms we expect for our users: we still wish to provide source code
> in the same manner as for programs, we still wish to be able to modify
> and update documentation, we still wish to be able to reuse portions of
> documentation elsewhere as conveniently as possible, and we still wish
> to be able to provide our users with exactly the documentation they want,
> without extraneous materials.
> How can this be fixed?
> ----------------------
> What, then, can documentation authors and others do about this?
> An easy first step documentation authors can take toward resolving
> the problems above is to not include any invariant sections in your
> documentation, since they are not required by the license, but are simply
> an option open to authors.
> Unfortunately this alone is not enough, as other clauses of the GFDL
> render all GFDL documentation unsuitable for Debian. As a consequence,
> other licenses should be investigated; generally it is probably simplest
> to use the same license for the documentation as for the software it
> documents, or for documentation that doesn't come with a particular
> piece of software, to choose either the GNU General Public License
> (for a copyleft license) or one of the BSD or MIT licenses (for a
> non-copyleft license).
> As most GFDL documentation is made available under "the terms of the GNU
> Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published
> by the Free Software Foundation", the Free Software Foundation is able
> to remedy these problems for a great many works by issuing a new version
> of the license. The problems discussed above require relatively minor
> changes to the GFDL -- allowing invariant sections to be removed, allowing
> transparent copies to be made available concurrently, and moderating the
> restrictions on technical measures. Unfortunately, while members of the
> Debian Project have been in contact with the FSF about these concerns
> since 2001, these negotiations have not come to any conclusion to date.
- --
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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